Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post on T. Boone Pickens and his Plan:

Men without imagination consider the Pickens Plan to be wildly implausible. For starters, what are the odds of converting cars to natural gas cars when gasoline dominates and electric vehicles are in fashion? With the exception of Honda and its Civic GX, pictured below, no major automaker manufactures a natural-gas car, and even if some did, these cars couldn’t get refuelled — vanishingly few gas stations offer fill-ups of natural gas. There are also performance reasons to shy away from natural-gas vehicles — they require larger gas tanks, robbing cars of half their trunk space; even with a larger tank, they require fill-ups almost twice as often; and they can explode. Little wonder that fewer than one-tenth of 1% of the 250 million vehicles on the road run on natural gas.
Pickens does not lack for imagination. He imagined that natural-gas vehicles at half the cost of the $25,000 Honda Civic GX would spark demand. To turn fantasy to reality, Pickens approached those ablest to get the job done — not the top designers and engineers at Honda and other manufacturers but the top U.S. lawmakers. This week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Orrin Hatch of Utah, joined by Pickens himself, announced legislation to lower the cost of driving a natural gas vehicle.
The legislation would cover up to $12,500 for passenger cars and light trucks and $64,000 for heavier vehicles. Even better, this bill doesn’t stop at halving the cost of buying a natural gas vehicle. It also lowers the cost of buying natural gas for vehicular use. And it expands and extends tax incentives for the installation of Pickens-style refuelling stations — builders of natural-gas refuelling stations will be able to receive up to $100,000 per station.

Read the rest here.